“That’s up to you,” said Camilla.
“Will your families like me? Will they say, ‘Well done, Pyrrha, well done, Camilla, well done, Palamedes’？”
Camilla smiled audibly.
“No,” she said.
After that Nona slept, or thought she was sleeping: she lay in the heat feeling it itch across her body, rolling over to find the cool part of the pillow where Camilla had tucked the frozen blocks in the pillowslip like she did every night. She heard Camilla breathing and felt nearly completely at peace, happy despite everything. Sometimes it was hard not to be happy; sometimes it was so difficult when everyone else had that hard, hurt look at the corners of their eyes that meant they didn’t quite know how to carry on: the men at the dairy, Pyrrha, Palamedes, the nice lady teacher at school, Kevin.
When she was 90 percent asleep, she heard the door very quietly unlatch and close. Then she counted, and at the end of five counts there was Pyrrha at the door saying, “Ah, my darling hearts, my sleeping babes, Daddy’s own treasures,” and Camilla saying without opening her eyes, “Go to bed. I just got her to sleep.”
Nona fell asleep and was happy.
JOHN 5:20
IN THE DREAM, she said, “But that’s it? They shut you down—it was over?”
They were standing at the top of a hill now. She couldn’t remember moving. At the bottom of the hill there was a great swept-out plain, as though somebody had cupped their hand over the landscape and scraped everything to one side. Like filth off a table. It was clean to their left, and to their right, where the invisible hand had stopped, was a huge confusion of rubble and metal and foliage—trees and structures; stones and metal.
He sat down on a patch of brown grass and laughed a little, and said, “Beloved, it wouldn’t be over—it wouldn’t begin—for a year.”
He said: It was the thin end of the wedge. He said that official paperwork claimed they’d decided to pull back and think things through again, but he’d always known they’d reinvested in something else, he just didn’t know what. He said when the leak happened everyone suddenly knew everything, their project was all over the news, everyone had a fucking opinion. Then it suddenly dawned on the general public that this was the next move—we really were in the endgame, you weren’t going to last the distance—and everyone started to panic. The economy tanked. It hadn’t been in great shape to begin with.
A— was panicking because our kill-fee money was suddenly worth nothing and what if the banks crashed and that nothing went too? C— was panicking because with the project over she was getting recalled to England and didn’t want to go, she’d got N— and didn’t want to leave her, refused to admit they were dating even though we all knew. M— was panicking because we had a health board and someone from Energy coming to talk about shutdown and what the hell were we going to do with all the dead bodies we’d collected to test on?
He said, It was the last one that was getting to me. I knew all those bodies by name. Funny to say, but they were my mates, you know? I’d worked on them for such a long time, and they’d given us so much, and now they were going to get dumped in some concrete skip because after what we’d done to them they couldn’t be cremated or buried safely. I hated that.
I didn’t have to worry about the public or the media—we had a pet cop, P—。 She’d made detective by that point; was going on to big things in the MoD. Knew G— from way back, and G— and I were both hometown boys, so P— kept the heat down for us. We got a lot of attention at first because they wanted someone to blame, wanted to rubberneck, wanted to write up think pieces about it. Wanted to know who we were. M— and A— could’ve walked into new jobs in a heartbeat but I was irradiated, I’d never work in the industry again. I sure as hell wouldn’t be allowed to work on anything else to do with you. I told M— and A— to go and that I’d shut up shop, but they wouldn’t leave me. None of them left me.
He said: It was such pandemonium. I mean, the worst was yet to come, but it was like the crisis had been announced all over again. Like you’d sprung this on us out of nowhere, like you’d never said you were sick. We went through the same old shitty questions of what to do. What about the Mars installation, what about the fusion batteries? We’ve still only got room for five million tops up there, guys, and we haven’t worked out how to feed them either. What about the Kuiper platform, what about Uranus, what about the shell we’re building there? And it’s like, we knew that was going to be slow twenty years ago, before we knew we were fucked. The only way out was to dump the population on an exoplanet. The cryo cans would have let us get everyone to Tau Ceti in my lifetime. Then we could work backward from there. It was about giving you breathing room, you know? I knew I wouldn’t live to see you get well, but I wanted to stop you hurting.